David E. Frank, Angela Beyer and Troy Dunn (Photo by Paul Rubenstein)
Reviewed by F. Kathleen Foley
City Garage
Through March 17
RECOMMENDED
One of the great pleasures and challenges of experiencing Nobel Prize-winner Harold Pinter’s slyly oblique plays is parsing the subterranean subtexts buried beneath his plots and pauses.
Betrayal, Pinter’s frequently revived 1978 play about an adulterous love affair — told backwards from the breakup of the affair to its first, rapturous beginning — is possibly his most emotionally manifest work. Supposedly based on Pinter’s own longstanding extramarital affair, the play somewhat upends his typically elliptical style. Here, early on, the audience becomes privy to the phases of the various “betrayals,” while the characters’ deceptions, plied with covert cleverness and skill, set the stage for their collective unhappiness. Of course, the obvious irony is that all these cheaters are most adept at self-deception, a destructive practice that reconfigures their lives. It’s not exactly a descent into tragedy or even misery. Yet we sense that these individuals’ inability to confront the truth, even within themselves, will result in increasing alienation and loneliness.
In their excellent current production at City Garage, director Frédérique Michel and her longtime collaborator and designer, Charles A. Duncombe, have assembled an outstanding cast whose work rings true, from their undistracting and authentic British accents to their subtly underplayed performances.
In the opening scene, Jerry (Troy Dunn), a successful literary agent, meets his former lover, Emma (Angela Beyer), the wife of his best friend Robert (David E. Frank), for the first time in two years. Happily married to a doctor and the father of two children, Jerry takes the news of Emma’s split from Robert in stride. It’s when he learns that she has told Robert of their infidelity that he melts down. It’s not so much his betrayal of Robert that he regrets, but the fact that he may no longer be able to see his old buddy on their former footing.
In a nervous state, Jerry immediately meets with Robert and references Emma’s divulgence, supposedly made the night before. He’s stunned to learn that Robert, a serial philanderer himself, has been aware of their affair for four years.
And so on and so forth. Revelations and betrayals compound. These upper-class Britishers are a privileged lot from society’s top drawer, one in which they carefully conceal their dirty linen — or at least try to. The layers of game-playing and subterfuge recall a stripped-down La Ronde, played out in miniature with the trio of principal characters and Jerry’s offstage wife, whom he suspects may now be having an affair herself.
Meanwhile, a narrator (Gifford Irvine) prefaces each scene with the time frame in which the action is occurring. It’s a shrewd and necessary device that keeps us abreast of the ever-shifting chronology.
Betrayal is an innovative and gripping tale that shows the sad cost — and, make no mistake, the covert thrills — of self-serving duplicity. Reflective of Michel and Duncombe’s uncompromising theatrical standards, City Garage’s production is a welcome opportunity to experience a masterly play that, despite its inverted structure, is arguably Pinter at his most accessible.
City Garage, 2525 Michigan Ave. Building T1, Santa Monica. Fri.-Sat., 8 p]m., Sun., 4 pm; thru March 17. (310) 453-9939. www.citygarage.org 90 minutes with no intermission.
